"
Lingard thought: "Nobody is." Never before had she seemed to him more
unapproachable, more different and more remote. The glow of a number of
small fires lighted the ground only, and brought out the black bulk
of men lying down in the thin drift of smoke. Only one of these fires,
rather apart and burning in front of the house which was the quarter of
the prisoners, might have been called a blaze and even that was not a
great one. It didn't penetrate the dark space between the piles and the
depth of the verandah above where only a couple of heads and the glint
of a spearhead could be seen dimly in the play of the light. But down
on the ground outside, the black shape of a man seated on a bench had
an intense relief. Another intensely black shadow threw a handful of
brushwood on the fire and went away. The man on the bench got up. It was
d'Alcacer. He let Lingard and Mrs. Travers come quite close up to him.
Extreme surprise seemed to have made him dumb.
"You didn't expect . . ." began Mrs. Travers with some embarrassment
before that mute attitude.
"I doubted my eyes," struck in d'Alcacer, who seemed embarrassed, too.
Next moment he recovered his tone and confessed simply: "At the moment
I wasn't thinking of you, Mrs. Travers." He passed his hand over his
forehead. "I hardly know what I was thinking of.
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